this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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Which units are best doesn't matter: the point is, nobody else uses standard units anymore, apart from a couple oddball countries, and only one of them - North Korea - isn't trying to extricate itself from it.
Everybody else tries to be a part of the world's technical and scientific communities by speaking the same language, but of course America has to be different. Because of course it does... And it's tiring if you ask me.
America does speaks metric, especially the technical and scientific communities. They just also speak standard.
Don't other countries get on Americans for not speaking more than one language? Why is that now a detriment?
Because people enjoy hating America. It's one of lemmys favorite pass times.
Well they shouldn't. It's harmful.
Donโt forget another area where metric is somehow thriving; the inner cities in the US.
Edit: yaโll need to lighten up.
US scientists also use metric.
US scientists are a very tiny minority of Americans, and getting tinier day by day.
Sadly true...
I dunno - I had to buy a mattress bed and sheets in feet in Thailand. We donโt even do that in America.
And the steel tube was sold in inches, meters and millimeters ยฏ_(ใ)_/ยฏ
You are calling that "standard units" ? When only 1 country uses them ? Oh the irony ...
That's just the name of US customary units: they're usually called standard. Just like the old British customary units were called imperial when there hasn't been a British empire for quite a few decades.
And I agree with you, fully, except for temperature. โIf everyone was jumping off a bridgeโ, right?
The scale is stupid and I donโt give a fuck if itโs the โnormโ. The norm is dumb.
Norms may be dumb but they make everybody's lives easier when everybody follows them.
As for temperature specifically, there's nothing inherently better in Celsius or Fahrenheit. It's just a choice. The only unit that is superior to all of them is the Kelvin because it has a true zero, but it's not commonly used in everyday settings.
But there is something inherently better in Fahrenheit! 0 is fucking cold. 100 is goddamn hot. Itโs a measure that makes sense to the perception of us, human beings.
0 in Celsius is a little cooler than brisk, and 100 means youโve been dead for a while. Itโs a dumb system for humans to use.
Yet somehow Celsius seems to speak to everybody outside the United States just fine.
0 means water freezing, 100 means water boiling. This is actually quite helpful to know instinctively.
Sure if we are cooking, doing chemistry or anything else that directly involves liquids and doesn't need extremely specific values that Celsius isn't equip to handle.
The only real difference between f and c is how fine the scale is. That's it. Literally the ONLY functional difference.
If you dont need a finer scale then F has no benefits over C and they are entirely equal.
And realistically if your getting into precision just use fucking kelvin.
Both F and C objectively suck ass equally. Honestly the only time in my life I've found F or C to better is when I need to set the temp on a thermostat. F on cheap thermostats is more reliable as it has less leeway before it kicks on/off. Resulting in a more consistent air temperature.
C tends to drift more above and below the set point. But nicer thermostats tend to not have that issue anyways. So it's a moot point most of the time.
You do realise water can fall from the sky, right? 100ยฐC might not be too useful for outside temperatures, but knowing if there might be ice on the road or not seems like a useful thing to know.
Also, as a maths teacher, having frequent negative temperatures makes working with negative numbers a lot more intuitive for students. The fact that Americans apparently use 1 for the ground floor means Iโd lose out on both of my simple real-world examples of negative numbers.
This is such a bike shed issue. You're being ridiculous.